Both in the spirit of blogs taking over the known digital world (for the moment) and for the nice expression of what I think is at the middle of the stuff KPS folk are interested in, a nice quote from the creating passionate users blog.

The quote:

Learning is one of the fundamental reasons games are so engaging. For most games, the moment you have nothing left to learn is the moment you become bored and move on. Most teachers know that real self-esteem doesn't come from people thinking you're good at something... it comes from actually being good. Almost any activity gets better and better the more you improve, the improvement is nearly always a result of learning.

Musicians know this. Snowboarders know this. Programmers know this.

The more you learn, the better you are at something. The better you are, the more engaging it is. If you can help people have more of that feeling, they won't talk about how good you are-- they'll talk about how much they kick ass.

And that's a powerful formula for creating passionate users.

The word expert is tossed about a lot, even in KPS-style stuff. I came across this little polemic which I thought was interesting. It derives from that dreaded new fad in education, "brain science". The book, The New Brain (oooh I hate refs to Amazon but too lazy to fix it) looks to be in that "this is what brain science tells us about how to be a whizz". As in all of this work, it can be mined for useful stuffand points to the work of K. Anders Ericsson who works on genuises, prodigies, and superior performers.

These ideas loosely couple with that notion of high expectations which is another way of talking about the serious work kids do in KPS-style environments.

and now for something entirely different

The rise and rise of the neurosciences and their slow but steady drip into educational thinking, at least at a gestural level has been something I have been trying to keep an eye on over the years. But today I stumbled on a piece that, at the very least, provides some interesting insights into possible relationships between the social and learning.

It's an Edge essay by V.S.Ramachandran called Mirror Neurons and the Brain in the Vat. If you have time on your hands or on some other part of your body, might be worth a glance.

One more

Came across this nice piece from Education Week. One of the author's (at least) is connected to the work described in the previous post. The article begins with two lovely quotes:

“So between odd and the same, you got to be rooting for odd.”
—Adam Sandler, in the movie “Spanglish”

“We are in an Age of High Standard Deviation.”
—Tom Peters, in his book Re-Imagine!

Well worth a read.

I've never suggested that any of the stuff we are interested in in terms of a KPS agenda is particularly new or unique. It's just one of many instances of what I think is important at this time on the planet, doing experiments in doing school differently. I stumbled across some cool folk who appear to be doing similar stuff in the US among what Tom Peters calls his "cool friends". Well worth a look. Might drop 'em an eline.

This little scribble comes via Leonie who was talking to child #3 (of 6) who is female, 15 and, imho, very savvy. A discussion about school, what it was like produced a response along these lines.

School is a place where you run a lot of mazes, like rats. So you are put in a maze and asked to find the cheese. So you set off and and run and eventually get through the maze only to find that there is no cheese, only this machine that generates the smell of cheese. Your reward for completing the maze is to do another one.

I think I like this rat.

Welcome a new recruit

I am conscious of not making this "thing" some of us call KPS too much of a thing. In any event, I've been working with a talented woman who has opted to do her Masters research in this area, Sue de Vincentis (spde@deakin.edu.au). Sue is planning on having students make an orientation DVD to a school, something similar to Carmel's work in mt Isa. Sue's research question is: How will a group of students independently execute a school community task which requires specialised knowledge? I've added Sue to the blog list.

On the talking wireless

Leonie and Trudy "appeared" on Radio National this morning talking to Kate Evans about KPS-related stuff. Lots of labels were tossed about including future-proofing kids, engaged learning, real life learning etc. It went well. Kate asked lots of challenging questions and got good thoughtful replies. I'll see if i can pop an MP3 onto the KPS site sometime if folk are interested.

Why football is better than school

A colleague passed this short piece by Herb Childress on to me. While it is written about High School, much of the commentary could apply to schools generally. I know there is a lot of this kind of material about but if I have learned anything about formal systems of education it is that winning a battle never means you have won. Just as in a war, you have to maintain your position, reinforce it, repeat it, rework it and sell, sell, sell it. There is a way to think about this that can be derived from my weird little interest in actor-network theory but I don't want to muddy the simple notion which is about vigilance and the policing of wins and boundaries.

Herb's piece reminded me of the terrific checklist of questions that Trudy has developed in relation to good learning.

In any event, I thought the article useful grist.

Small steps

This is the first time I have had to sit and mull the KPS conference and also the AARE conference which followed immediately after. For me, the KPS work appears more and more in terms of agency (not an innocent term), i.e. agency of kids, of teachers, even of principals!

Trudy's post about what motivates community underlines a key issue in this work. In practical terms it is important to begin to map and explore the ways in which new kinds of relationships between community and schools are formed. But it is also important, I think, to mull over how kids might begin to interpret 'the world outside' in other than pragmatic terms.

It's a move beyond where things are now but if this is about kids learning to engage and act in and on the world, including their school-world, then how they make sense of that world is an important part of their learning. And, I guess, this presupposes how we make sense of the world. No easy matter.